SOFTWARE EXPORT BOARD IN PAKISTAN

Promoting Pakistan as a competitive choice for outsourcing is vital in order to secure foreign investment in the IT sector. PSEB aims to promote Pakistan as a Destination of Choice for global IT Investors by engaging itself in a series of exhibitions, delegations and events to enable trade interaction with key international markets and parties, facilitate the entry of multi-national development and support centers into Pakistan. In addition, PSEB undertakes number of print and online campaigns and publishes the success stories of IT industry in leading local and international media.

DELEGATIONS
PSEB organizes visits by business delegations from Pakistan to various countries. This provides them with an opportunity to interact with their international counterparts; share best practices; and showcase their new and upcoming products/services in new and established markets.

IBM Research

The Call Center Scheduler (CCS), which has been in development at the IBM Haifa Research Labs (HRL) since 1996, is a roster planning and management tool that runs on Windows and NT operating systems. CCS is used in information call centers with a high volume of incoming calls, each demanding a skilled agent response.

CCS generates optimal periodic schedules for these call center agents while maintaining the required level of service. The schedules optimally utilize the agents' skills while taking into account their work preferences such as which days they would like to work and which shifts they want to cover. The manager of the call center creates an optimal working schedule by entering the skills and preferences of the agents into the CCS program.

Call Center Provide Quality Customer Support Effectively?

ICE's quality management application, NiceUniverse™ will be installed in a total of seven of the fourteen SNT contact centers located in the Netherlands, with one center in neighboring Belgium, upon completion of this first stage. The system integrator for the project is KPN Telecom, NICE's distributor in the Netherlands.

SNT provides outsource inbound and outbound teleservices specializing in "one-stop-shopping" and customer care solutions for more than 350 Dutch and international customers in the telecom, financial services, consumer goods, information technology, entertainment, public services, utilities, and charitable institution industries.

Pieter Bezemer, director of operations for SNT, said, "Previously, our quality management program consisted of manually taping calls with a tape recorder. Obviously, this was very inefficient and we could not get the results we desired. We chose NICE because it provided the tools and capabilities, as well as the flexibility, we need to move to the next level in quality management so we can provide an improved customer experience."

"SNT provides teleservices to literally hundreds of top European companies and institutions," said Lior Arussy, NICE's vice president of global marketing, CTI (computer telephony integration) division. "They're a leader in the Benelux outsource contact center market and they wanted to enhance that leadership position. With NiceUniverse, SNT is significantly bolstering its quality management program and the services it can offer. Recently, SNT added a leading European bank to its client roster because the bank was looking for customer service capabilities backed by a superior quality management program. With NICE, SNT could deliver."

SNT will implement quality management for both voice and screen in the seven contact centers, encompassing over 1800 seats. The NICE system is fully integrated with an Aspect switch.

SNT's Bezemer continued, "We are in the midst of implementing new systems to measure changes in efficiency and service in our contact center operations, but I can tell already that we are seeing quantifiable return on investment as a result of our decision to implement the NICE solution. Because reviews of agent calls conducted with the NICE system take half the time as our previous system, we are able to tremendously increase the number of calls we can review and, importantly, the quality of the review. With our contact center handling over 25 million calls per year, in multiple project environments, this increase in reviewed calls and review effectiveness translates into a vastly improved customer experience and a much better product that SNT can offer to the market."

WORLD'S CALL CENTER'S JOBS WANT'S

A Virtual call center provides customer service through home-based employees. You can make money at home answering phone calls for a company that hires you through a virtual call center employer. If you are disabled or just want a job from home, this may be the perfect solution for you.






Instructions:
Step 1
Log onto a site that has virtual call center services, such as Alpine Access or Startek (see Resources below).

Step 2
Click on "Careers" to either apply for the company or to see what jobs are available. Fill out all the information the company requires to apply.

Step 3
Make sure you have all the equipment the company requires, such as a landline, a phone, Internet access and a computer.

Step 4
Wait for a response from the company. They will most likely email or call you to set up a phone interview time.

Step 5
Put on your best professional voice when being interviewed over the phone. Some companies require you to apply with a computer-generated "interviewer" so they can see if you have a good phone voice before setting up a real interview with you.

Ensuring Data Quality in the Contact Center by google call center

When was the last time you opened up a customer record to handle an inquiry only to find the comment field populated with abbreviations and codes that made the documentation unintelligible? Or, as you are quality checking the data side of a call, you find entries into fields that “are not allowed” according to procedures but certainly are allowed by the database? If you have, then you probably agree with Howard (2007) “Data quality isn’t just a data management problem, it’s a company problem.” And, certainly it is a customer contact problem we have to address sooner rather than later.

In his article, Howard describes how he was in the process of integrating three new data sources into his enterprise customer database when he discovered the sad truth to the lack of data quality management. The first two files had the state code field correctly defined as a two-byte field however file number one had 64 values defined for state codes and the second file had 67 distinct values defined. The third file had the state field defined as 18 bytes with 260 distinct state codes defined. At this point he begins to ask, “whose problem is data quality anyway?”

To try to figure out his dilemma, Howard first looks to the data modeler who could have defined a domain table of state and commonwealth codes that would force anyone using the database to enter a common code set. He then considered the application development team whose “application edit checks failed to recognize the 50 valid state codes or provide any text standardization conversions.” He states that whether or not a company has a quality assurance team is largely dependent on the size of the company but goes on to say that data quality with these teams may not be better. In his example, the fact that the state code should be only two bytes in length and conform to the USPS standard was overlooked. Because there was no specific requirement to test, these data sources passed QA with flying colors. Howard says, “More than likely, someone assumed everyone knew the 50 state codes and that writing validation code was a waste of time. After all, everyone knows the state abbreviations for Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri. (Don't feel bad if you have to check - I did.)” Finally, he turns to the business users. An executive at one of Mr. Howard’s clients told him that data quality at their company was an afterthought. “Bad information was captured and passed on to the next application that assumed the first application had done its job. Bad data is persistently stored in multiple data stores.”

Mr. Howard’s article presents a valid question: Because data integrity is critical to the success in today’s corporations, who is responsible? Enterprise systems contain critical product, customer, and employee data. This data is integrated into management reports including dashboards and scorecards. Managers and executives use this data to make both tactical and strategic decisions. If someone does not take the responsibility to manage the quality of data quality, critical data elements / metrics may be incorrect or unusable thus jeopardizing the success of an organization. We all know what happens when a customer contact agent inputs undefined abbreviations and nonsense data into customer interaction fields. What can we do as customer contact professionals to ensure the quality of this precious data?

Essential Ingredients For A Successful Call

Today, sales professionals have become problem-solvers and information gatherers. They must attend innumerable seminars in order to increase product knowledge. They must follow up to protect existing customers. Their responsibilities are constantly expanding.

world's best Call Center Qualification Criteria

The annual survey, which analyzed over 870 international outsourcing vendors in 63 countries, was considered by users, clients and employees to find 'Top 50 best managed vendors' for 2006.

The companies were ranked based on their consistent strength in the areas of human capital performance, CEO commitment, corporate direction and leadership impact. Other factors included client and employee satisfaction.

24/7 Customer has been evaluated on 44 indicators on outsourcing industry superiority, of which 26 indicators are specific to leadership, and 18 indicators addressing operational results.

Scott Wilson and Doug Brown, co-authors of The Black Book of Outsourcing, state in the book: "Continual improvements earned 24/7 Customer, the distinction of being the best performing global call center; lowering attrition and actively mentoring workers to keep clients happy."

"24/7 Customer is honoured to receive this prestigious ranking, as we rapidly expand our presence across the globe and strive to create better value for our clients," said P V Kannan, Co-Founder and CEO, 24/7 Customer. "We see this accolade as a testimony to our ability to execute consistently and surpass customer expectations, meet and exceed our employees' needs."